A Free Democracy Needs Free Speech
Cancel culture, tech censorship, & culture wars poison our democracy. The cure to bad speech isn’t less speech — it’s more.
Due to recent events, free speech on social media has become quite the hot topic. But we shouldn’t need Twitter getting a new tech overlord to spark a public conversation about our relationship with the 1st Amendment in the 21st Century. Understandably, opinions on this issue are diverse. What counts as misinformation, and how harmful is it? When does protected speech become violent harassment? Should private social media companies respect our free speech rights the same way our government is constitutionally-obligated to?
All of these (and more) are essential questions of our era that I don’t presume to know all the answers to. I can only advocate for what I believe — which is that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”, to paraphrase Louis Brandeis and Noam Chomsky. No government or corporation should have the right to spy on or censor the American people. When it comes to complicated problems related to free speech, the solution is almost always more speech, not less. If you’ll hear me out, please allow me to make the case for why and how modern America must recommit to the promises of the 1st Amendment.
Almost everywhere we look today, our society is becoming more hostile to free speech. This hostility spans both cultural and political institutions, ranging from the farcical to the fascistic — at the silly end is the “Twitter Jail” that celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and Gina Carano occasionally get dogpiled into after making dumb comments; at the scary end is the brutal state-sanctioned prosecution of boat-rockers like journalist Julian Assange and whistleblower Steven Donziger. But most examples fall somewhere between these extremes; like public health leaders and mainstream media gatekeepers smearing proponents of the Covid lab-leak hypothesis as baseless conspiracy theorists instead of openly discussing the possibility, or Florida politicians censoring teachers who have the audacity to answer their students’ questions about gender and sexuality.
But no matter how malignant the censorship, one trend remains constant: we’re becoming a society intolerant of disagreement and allergic to forgiveness. Let’s keep it real: nobody’s perfect. Everyone’s done, said, or thought some cringeworthy things — myself included. But our elite institutions and cultural tribes would rather crush free speech than allow any dissent from their ideological hegemony. Don’t like Joe Rogan’s random interviews with questionable quacks? Cancel him. Don’t like Emily Wilder’s critiques of the Israel-Palestine conflict? Get her fired. Don’t like some unsavory speaker who got invited to your campus? Silence them. Again and again, clout strangles communication. Potential learning moments become (cultural) trench wars.
The irony is how profoundly counterproductive these repressive reflexes are. More often than not, attempting to censor a person or idea only makes their “forbidden fruit” even more alluring to others. (Any parent who has ever used reverse psychology could corroborate this.) Plus, misinformation doesn’t even come from free speech; it comes from institutional distrust. Like mold, it festers in the dark. So the best way to combat misinformation is for institutions to do the hard work of rebuilding public trust. But the 2nd-best way is with more speech: instead of driving conspiracies deeper into the darkness that spawns them, shine a light on them through open discussion. After all, truly bad ideas can’t survive much scrutiny. And when an unusual idea happens to have some merit — well, isn’t it best to keep an open mind anyway?
To be fair, free speech isn’t limitless. For example, our law does not recognize threats of violence and revenge porn as free speech: both civil and criminal deterrents exist to hold such “speakers” accountable. Victims of these forms of harassment can (and should) throw the book at those perpetrators. And social media content moderators should absolutely scrub such illegal speech from their platforms and notify the relevant authorities. But otherwise, social media companies should not act as speech gatekeepers that smite controversial content. This isn’t just a lofty principle; it’s a practical safeguard — sooner or later, censorship regimes always benefit the powerful at the expense of the powerless. Plus, do we really want to be an orthodox society that bullies people into self-censorship and discourages independent thinking? Or do we want to be an open society that thinks outside the box and encourages dialogue, debate, and healthy skepticism? In my opinion, the answer is clear.
But how do we recommit to the 1st Amendment? How do we not only double-down on free speech as a principle, but also foster a culture that encourages speaking truth to power? And how can we harness social media as an engine for public discourse? Let’s consider a few reforms that could maximize free speech in our new public squares:
Open the algorithms. Social media algorithms obstruct free speech by limiting our access to information and artificially driving us into increasingly-extreme niches. These shadowy, profit-hunting algorithms addict us while rewarding conflict over conversation and shock-value over substance. Unsurprisingly, nearly 60% of people want more algorithm transparency. And — while controversial — mandating algorithm transparency from social media companies is a reasonable starting point. All algorithms that decide which content shows up on our user feeds should, by law, be open-source. (This would also have the healthy side-effect of promoting competition in a social media market currently dominated by giants.) But we can do even better: each of us social media users should have the power to choose what kind of content our personal algorithm prioritizes. Perhaps you want to see political posts that agree with you, or perhaps you want to see posts that challenge your opinions instead? Maybe you want to avoid political content entirely, preferring instead to see updates from friends and family? Or what if you want your specific artistic or cultural niche catered to? By law, we should each have the power to consciously choose what content the algorithms throw at us.
Bring down the walls that lock users in & competition out. The internet was once a wild west; a “marketplace of ideas” where communication was virtually limitless across both time and scale. If you didn’t like one website, you could easily leave for another — or start your own. But as time went on, the internet became more and more like cable TV: consolidated, corporate, and walled-off by gatekeepers. Nowadays, a handful of social media giants have monopolized online communication in their “walled gardens”, giving users no choice but to either put up with their policies or face total excommunication from the online public square. But we can fix this. Instead of attacking Section 230, we should legally force the tech giants to open their platforms with interoperability — allowing users to opt-out of sharing our data, empowering us to transfer portable data between companies, legalizing competitive compatibility so 3rd-party startups can challenge the oligopolies, and forcing the tech giants to host backdoor interfaces so users and 3rd parties can interact across platforms.
Break up Big Tech. To be clear, I don’t mean to break up social media companies in their original forms — only to reverse the feeding frenzy of mega-mergers between what were initially different companies. Force Facebook to sell off Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Force Google to sell off Youtube. And so on… The less consolidated Big Tech oligopolies are, the more choices users will have about speech and moderation options. A century ago, we understood the dangers monopolies and oligopolies posed to our civil rights. We would do well to remember them.
Repeal the “PATRIOT” Act. This one is pretty self-explanatory. The 2001 PATRIOT Act and subsequent FISA amendments legalized warrantless wiretapping and gave government spymasters vast, obscure, and unaccountable powers to surveil We The People. Bluntly, the PATRIOT Act and its legislative progeny belong in the trash bin of history.
Teach Civics in schools. Ultimately, we must start early if we hope to foster a proudly pro-speech culture. America needs a national and comprehensive K-12 civics curriculum so that every child — from sea to shining sea — knows how to debate dialectically, think critically, and learn empirically. Proficiency in logical argument and the scientific method aren’t only useful to lawyers and doctors; they’re the bedrock of a free democracy. Civics is no less important than math and science. Every American high school graduate should understand the structure of our Union and how to participate in it.
If you remember nothing else from this free speech manifesto, let it be this — hate each other less; hate the system more. Dissent is patriotic. More conversation is almost never a bad thing, and ideological diversity is our greatest strength. America takes the best parts of other cultures and makes them our own; we mix and match the best ideas from all over the world to become more than just the sum of our parts. And like the black and Jewish lawyers who defended the 1st Amendment rights of the vilest racists and neo-Nazis, we must always remember the messy truth that if we don’t believe in free speech for the people we despise, then we don’t believe in it at all.